Planning of new buses moves to the fast lane with HostPLM With HostPLM, Lahden Autokori has achieved significant time savings and financial gains. Planning time is reduced by 10-15 percent while the dialogue with customers has become more efficient.
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he Finnish company Lahden Autokori develops, manufactures and services bodies for tourist coaches. To replace its existing SolidWorks Enterprise PDM system, the company has chosen HostPLM from PLM Group to streamline the key process of planning the production of new buses based on customer orders. Previously, Lahden Autokori’s planners were facing major daily problems with response times from the PDM system with the reason being that the company’s servers lacked sufficient physical memory and in general were outdated. The company already had decided to outsource the operation of SolidWorks Enterprise PDM when it was introduced to HostPLM: “We were very impressed by the system and instantly decided to go for it. HostPLM and the system HostPLM Box, which is placed with us, provide both fast and secure encrypted communication and the problems of latency have completely disappeared,” says Saario, adding: “I am surrounded by happy faces, because our planners no longer have to wait for minutes or even hours before the
system responds to their queries. Their IT-tools now work exactly as they are supposed to. We save about 40 hours every week on unnecessary waiting. This time we can now spend on solving the actual planning tasks.” Rami Saario also stresses the fact that HostPLM is independent of geographical location and works on all kinds of different hardware platforms such as mobile devices. This has helped to streamline communications with customers on development projects: “When we are with customers, we can discuss directly based on what we show them on the screen. It makes the development process much more efficient. Our customers get a better understanding of the products early in the development process and that makes it easier to apply the changes they wish for at an early stage. This means that we avoid a lot of the much more costly changes which could occur later in the production phase.” The independence of geography and hardware platform also means better opportunities for Lahden Autokori’s employees to use the system to work from home and the traveling sales staff always have access to the right information at the
right time and place, Saario explains. HostPLM is used to support after-sales tasks such as management of spare parts, service and repairs. Lahden Autokori also plans to provide partners such as external planners and designers with access to certain kinds of information in the system. With a data volume of about 800 GB the PDM system by far is the largest IT system at Lahden Autokori. The system has 10-12 full time users and 8-10 part-time users. Earlier, an IT employee had worked full time to solve system problems. Instead he is now taking care of development tasks around the company’s ERP system. The introduction of HostPLM has also meant significant savings on IT development and hardware investments. Rami Saario descibes the introduction of HostPLM as a “payback party”. “It has been really good for the wallet,” he says, and furthermore points to the fact that HostPLM was implemented in a week and the implementation of the system ran smoothly without any noteworthy problems.
“I sleep much better at night because we now have a much more efficient, secure, flexible, stable and more cost efficient product planning solution,” says Lahden Autokori’s controller Rami Saario.
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